Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Printing Acrobatics

It took a whole evening of my life to get Acrobat Reader 7 to print on my box. I've installed it from the Debian Multimedia Packages Repository, soon after installing Debian, and only recently needed to print a document.

The printing dialog box shows the correct printer, but nothing happens when I try to print. I noticed that acroread uses the lpr command to print, so I opened a terminal and tried to print a text document with lpr. No luck. I used lpq to look at the print job queue and verified that the print job exists. The CUPS job queue, however, was empty.

I've managed to print by installing gtklp and using that as the printing command in acroread. But acroread keeps reverting to lpr after being restarted. I still haven't figured out how to fix it - and it's pretty annoying.

But I don't need to fix it, because I did manage to get lpr working. I stumbled upon debiantutorials.com, followed their instructions, and installed cupsys-bsd. This replaced lpr with a CUPS aware version, which made me happy again.

<rant>Being clueless can be very time consuming when it comes to using Linux. Making sense of it on your own often takes a lot of time and effort. It may be worth it, experience wise, but I do pretend to have a life, and episodes like this one just burst my bubble.</rant>